The language created more than 30 years ago for the
Star Trek race of long-haired warriors has moved boldly into pop culture where few other
alien tongues have gone before.

With a new book about the classic Klingon starship, Bird-of-Prey, and a Klingon spoof of the
Gangnam Style music video racking up millions of views on YouTube, Klingons are showing a
fun side that outstrips their Trekkie fan base.

With their high-ridged foreheads, starships that boast cloaking devices and strict code of
honor, Klingons are rivaling Mr. Spock’s Vulcans in the language and popularity stakes.

“Klingons are these big, mean tough warrior guys, but they are also funny, so it is fun to
behave like a Klingon,” said Marc Okrand, who created the guttural language and compiled the first
Klingon dictionary in 1985.

Okrand, a linguist in Washington, also created the Vulcan and Romulan dialogue for the 2009
feature film
Star Trek. But he says neither language has caught the imagination of fans or the wider
public the way Klingon has.

Despite a tiny vocabulary of just 2,000 to 3,000 words, Klingon is the most spoken fictional
language in the world, according to Guinness World Records. And last month saw a Swedish couple tie
the knot in a Klingon wedding ceremony at a
Star Trek convention in London.

There is already a Klingon Language Institute, Klingon translations of Shakespeare’s
Hamlet and the Book of Mormon, a Klingon version of the venerable board game Monopoly, a
Dutch opera sung in Klingon and an annual Klingon staging of
A Christmas Carol in Chicago.

The latest arrival is the
Klingon Bird-of-PreyOwners’ Workshop Manual, a book packed with illustrations, graphics and information (with
Klingon subtitles by Okrand) about the starship’s weaponry and life onboard.

Okrand said he never expected Klingon to take off the way is has when he first created the
language for the 1984 film
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, and the dictionary a year later.

“I honestly thought people would buy the dictionary and look through and laugh, and that would
be the end of it. I had no idea until a few years after that people would be studying it and
learning it.”